Desert
by micah-l-lucas
Summary: The lives of three separate people growing up in the desert.
1. The Slave

A young boy and his mother are traded off like property, send through the desert off to their next masters. This time they've been lost in a bet, and the mother has to uproot and take her three-year-old son with her.

The boy takes a dislike to sand at a young age. It's always blowing, always everywhere, and always, without fail, gets into his eyes. His mother places a scarf over his face to help this, but it only makes everything stuffy. No matter how hard his mother tries, she can't keep the sand out of his hair, and has to scrub his head every time he takes a bath.

When the boy is six, he decides he hates the desert all together. At night, when the work is done and he is home, he imagines leaving, and only coming back when he's grown to free all the slaves. He's been in the desert his entire life, and as much as he loves the idea of leaving, it doesn't seem real.

At nine, something changes. He has fallen into a sort of routine: when the work is done, he returns home and continues work on his various mechanical projects, before heading off to bed once the sky darkens. Then, repeat the next day. Things changed when the angel showed up at the shop. He had heard them spoken of before, mostly by pilots who were just passing through. Seeing this girl, there wasn't a doubt in his mind that she was one of them.

He does leave the desert, that same year. The rest of the universe is shockingly cold, not at all like the hot, stuffy wasteland he grew up in. He has to leave his mother behind, something that made him consider staying in the desert. In the end, she convinced him to go.

It is another ten years before he sees his mother again. He returns to the desert to find her gone; sold off to a moisture farmer near Mos Eisley. When he goes to find her, she's gone from there too. Her absence only reminds him of how much he hates the place.

His mother had married the man she was sold to, after he had freed her. The boy meets his step-brother, and his step-sister-in-law, as well as his now one-legged step-father. They all seem upset about his mother's absence, but they've given up hope. The boy takes it upon himself to find her.

He does find her, though he's much too late. She dies in his arms, and he carries her back to the farm to be buried, though only after she had been properly avenged. After she is buried, he swears to never return to the planet.

All it has left him with are bad memories.


	2. The Farmboy

The baby is carried around in a sling on his aunt's chest. He is serenely unaware of the horrors that he has already endured in his short life; taken away from his lifeless mother minutes after his birth, his father rumored to be dead. Separated from a twin that he doesn't know about.

The aunt and uncle are given his name: Luke, the name his mother gave to him in her last breath. It is what he's called, along with his father's last name. The only world he ever knows is the farm in the desert, living with his aunt and uncle due to the circumstances surrounding his birth.

He wonders about his parents when he's young. He looks in the mirror and tries to guess which one of them he looks like; which one of his parents had blue eyes? Did either of them have blond hair?

He asks about his parents often, though is only met with dismissive answers about what his parents had done. When he is eight, he learns their names. Anakin, for his father. Padmé, for his mother. He says the names over and over, worried he'll forget them. Anakin and Padmé. He wonders what they were like.

Once, in the middle of the night during a drought, there are thieves raiding the farm for water. He is the only one awake, and decides to try and handle them himself. This results in him being knocked out and the thieves getting away. He was carried home by a mysterious man and woke up in his own bed the next morning.

Brave, like his mother had been.

At nine, he asks about the gravestone on the farm. It's always been there, but he's never wondered about it until now.

"That's where your grandmother is buried," his aunt explains. "She died before you were born."

Did anyone live after he was born?

Usually the boy was upbeat and relatively happy, but on occasion he experienced something that can only be described as crippling loneliness. It's not that the boy doesn't have friends; he does, and he sees them often, but it's a kind of loneliness that he can't explain, not even to himself.

They were out when this happened on one occasion, and happened to run into one of Luke's friends.

"Do you want to come and play with Luke?" his aunt had asked.

Luke had said, "I don't want to hang out with anyone right now."

He worried his aunt and uncle. Not only with the random spells of intense loneliness, but by his strong desire to leave. Around the age of eight or nine, he developed similar ideas to his father. He planned to leave and become a pilot, and never return to the sandy wasteland that had been his home for his entire life.

"He's too much like his father," his uncle insisted.

"You can't keep him here forever," his aunt argued.

The time for the boy to leave eventually came, though rather abruptly. The deaths of his aunt and uncle severed his ties to the planet and forced him to leave. He swore to never return.


	3. The Scavenger

She finds the helmet three months after she's left in the desert. On the side were the words 'Dosmit Ræh' written in Aurebesh. She didn't know how she knew that; she couldn't remember much before the past three months. But the name 'Ræh' seemed familiar somehow. She'd heard it before. Was it hers?

She kept the helmet. It was far too big for her, but she liked the look of it. She almost felt like it was awakening something in her memory, giving her a sense of déjà vu. Whatever it was, she couldn't put her finger on it.

She spends most of her time watching the skies. Waiting. After five years of waiting, she gets pretty good at it. Her life 'before' is nearly nonexistent in her memory. Sometimes there are impressions; images. A certain smell will trigger something long since buried. She is pretty sure the blue-eyed man in her memories is her father—she grasps the memory tightly, willing it to stay with her. They are laying on their backs, staring up at the stars. He is telling her a story.

Sometimes a pale face with green eyes haunts her memory; her mother, she's sure. She wishes she could remember more. Other than those few things, the desert wasteland of Jakku is the only life she's ever known. The family that left her behind are as good as ghosts in her memory.

Still, she watches. Waits.


End file.
